Stories from the field

Within the Americas Region, spanning from Chile in South America passing through the Caribbean and all the way to the United States, Kiva currently has 39 partner MFIs in 15 countries and about one third of all Kiva loans funded so far. Last Tuesday the Kiva Summit of the Americas took place, the Kiva team in charge of managing all these partnerships met with a group of representatives from some of these institutions for the third time in Montevideo, Uruguay. As a Kiva Fellow, this was a great opportunity to participate in the discussion of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead on Kiva’s path. The topics that stirred the most discussion were…

Social Performance
Kiva is working on an effort to measure how effective their partners are in delivering on their social mission through the CERISE tool. The results help an MFIs be aware of their performance and where they need to pay more attention; while the intention is good partners had different points of view. One example is the customer participation category which is descriptive rather than evaluative. A cooperative will score very high while others will not and institutions don’t want to appear with “low” scores. A second example came from a Costa Rica partner, where they are limited to offer credits only and cannot offer insurance or savings that may benefit the borrowers. As a result in the range of products category will score very low. The issue is that partners do not want to have “low” scores when they operating within their own constraints and the challenge is how to communicate that without being an expert in the evaluation tool.

Networking
In the age of social networks and internet access in mobile phones there is still little communication between institutions and the idea of sharing knowledge among them was very well received. Considering that Kiva has several partners in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador (7, 5 and 3 respectively) and that Microfinance can be a very competitive market, the willingness to share knowledge is still there among the institutions present in the meeting. One of the comments went like this: “I’m open to share information if it’s going to prevent other institutions from making the same mistakes that we have” and was followed by the punch line “this project is a fight against poverty”. Face to face meetings like this one facilitate discussion and exchange but the challenge is to keep this communication flowing on a regular basis. Hopefully Kiva will be able to help in this regard and strengthen partner relations.

New Loan Products
Student loans recently made their debut in Kiva and were a great success, just like these loans Kiva partners have other products and pilot projects going on but we don’t hear about them. In this occasion the Kiva team brought up the question to find out what are those opportunities that you, the Kiva lender, is willing to fund. A very interesting pilot is for patients suffering tuberculosis. Situation: many patients leave their treatments early but the disease is still present and comes back stronger and more resistant to drugs, thus the patients ends with permanent physical damage and become isolated. At that point it becomes very hard for them to find a job or make a living. The promise of a business loan at the end of their treatment is strong motivation to go through the whole treatment because at the end they will have access to a loan to start a business activity and support themselves. While this is a very interesting pilot hopefully Kiva will get more ideas from their partners and you will have more opportunities to fund and make an impact.

Evaluating social performance, helping develop a partner network and evaluating and bringing new loan products are just some of the opportunities and challenges ahead, but Kiva is working hard with partners to bring more options for you to make an impact and deliver on its mission: connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

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About Kiva Fellows Program

Kiva Fellows are volunteers who maximize Kiva's impact around the world. By working closely with our Field Partners in over 50 countries, they make sure loan dollars go where they're needed most -- while having a few adventures along the way. Learn more >>